Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino Chasing Aphrodite

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In 1984, the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles sold all
its stock in Getty Oil and diversified its investment portfolio, almost
tripling its original endowment to $2 billion. This made the J. Paul
Getty Museum, essentially a rich man’s knockoff of an ancient Roman
villa in Malibu, the richest museum in the world and the Getty Trust the
second-largest charitable trust after the Ford Foundation.

The art found at the
Getty was now literally priceless. Literally priceless in two senses: If
the Getty wanted something on the world art market, money was no
object, and tickets for admission to the museum were free. When, for
example, an Australian businessman tried to buy Van Gogh’s Irises
for almost $54 million in 1989 but didn’t have the cash to complete the
purchase, the Getty quietly stepped in and bought the iconic
masterpiece.

From its earliest
days, however, the acquisitiveness enabled by the Getty’s almost
unbounded wealth was a curse rather than a blessing for the institution.
Chasing Aphrodite (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 375 pages, $28) by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino of the Los Angeles Times traces
how the Getty knowingly bought classical antiquities looted from
countries like Greece and Italy for decades while at the same time
pushing for museum reforms to end the illegal trade.

Along the way, the
authors introduce their readers to a gallery of almost mythic heroes and
roguish villains as well as at least one tragic figure in the classical
Greek sense. Among them is a scrappy Italian prosecutor named Paolo
Ferri who worked for almost a decade to build a case against two dealers
of looted antiquities and their biggest customer, Getty curator Marion
True. True was a working-class girl from Oklahoma who rose to curator of
the world’s richest museum and shaped its vision more than any other
single person before succumbing to the most human of temptations.

The Getty, as framed
by the authors, was a sinking ship that couldn’t decide which to throw
overboard—its stolen antiquities collection or its tainted curator—and
ultimately lost both. The Getty eventually gutted its antiquities
holdings, returning 40 contested pieces to Italy, including a 7-foot
statue of a windswept goddess long believed to be the Aphrodite
of the book’s title. True was forced to resign and went on trial for
conspiracy in Italy, a proceeding that dragged on for five years before
the statute of limitations expired.

Chasing Aphrodite
is a masterpiece of classic investigative journalism, which the
Pulitzer Prize finalists pieced together from internal documents leaked
to them by confidential sources within the Getty. With these documents,
the reporters, like museum conservators, have meticulously restored a
breathtaking story of institutional hubris as arresting as any Greek
sculpture.